My Zoominfo experience

Let me start by stating the obvious: I am not an expert investor. I started early November 2020, and I read a tremendous amount of content, from this board and other places, I, like John snow, still know nothing.

That being said; I work in a middle management position in a very profitable company and recently (last 3 weeks) I started getting a crazy amount of direct calls to my cellphone (3-4 a day… might mean nothing to you but I am not ok with that whatsoever) from companies trying to sell me their very often piss poor services.

At the time I didn’t know what triggered this. But after reading the board, I checked my profile on zoomInfo and there it was. Contacted the service and indeed my profile was added just before the calls started.

I didn’t give any clearance for them to do that. As soon as I removed my profile, most of the calls ceased.

I completely understand the need to sell; and ZI also tell you that you might get amazing recruitement offers by leaving your profile there.

The reality is you open yourself to a world of low quality SAAS companies. If you feel like you might benefit from that, go for it ! For myself the experience was really, really bad. We are not a super high performing company from the tech side, but the solutions offered multiple times a day were much, much worse than even what my analysts could draw up in a couple days.

As a result I will at least for the foresable future stay away from this company. I have no doubt they could be a great investment but man oh man, what a pain in the a**!

Ys

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Seems like ideal would be to have something like the way numbers are hidden when calling an Uber w messages going to voice mail in designated line. This way recipients can scroll through offers w/o nuisance and even choose to avoid them.

In Googling reviews of this co they are either despised or loved. Very polarizing.

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Hi Ydrasil,

Interesting experience. I have some questions about things which weren’t fully explained:

Did your company need the product they were selling?

Were you the right person to call for the product that they were selling?

the solutions offered multiple times a day were much, much worse than even what my analysts could draw up in a couple days.

It sounds as if you weren’t happy about the quality of the products that the callers were offering? If so, that wasn’t ZI’s fault but the fault of the companies who were producing the products, and didn’t have anything to do with ZI. Since ZI also has customers like Okta, Zoom, Shopify, SAP, Docusign, etc, you could also get calls from companies with very high quality products

You wrote: “I checked my profile on ZoomInfo and there it was.”

How in the world could you do that unless your own company was a ZoomInfo subscriber? Their information isn’t available to just anyone. Or did I misunderstand what you were saying?

It sounds as if ZI removed your profile when you asked, so they behaved responsibly.

Best,

Saul

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I don’t see how this is negative in any way regarding ZI? With countless Saas startups getting funded every day they all need lead generation tools and sales lists. Your experience just shows how much demand there is for their product. If they can’t sell to you, it’s not because ZI is bad.

Now if you had said the products being sold were wildly inappropriate and off, for example, you received a call from someone trying to sell you auto parts and you work in social media, that would be a problem for ZI.

Your analysis from what I read was just a personal gripe about telesales, not their product.

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You wrote: “I checked my profile on ZoomInfo and there it was.”

How in the world could you do that unless your own company was a ZoomInfo subscriber? Their information isn’t available to just anyone. Or did I misunderstand what you were saying?

You can check profiles by name (including your own, if it’s there) by going here:

https://www.zoominfo.com/s/search

Scroll down toward the bottom of the page to where you see the alphabet, and then click on the letter for your last name, and you will get prompted through a series of ever narrowing name ranges until you get to your name.

There may be some more information that would be visible if you were a subscriber, that I don’t know.

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Please delete if off topic, but I searched my name, found it, and within a minute my phone rang. Coincidence?

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Ysdrasill has brought up an interesting point. It seems there may be a pattern here and a potential problem with ZoomInfo’s business model. The best leads get annoyed at all the cold calls and eventually opt out. Presumably these top leads who got annoyed are out of ZoomInfo’s system forever, so there should be some sort of value drain over time.

This is only a problem if enough people:
a) Figure out they are in ZoomInfo’s system
b) Get annoyed and want to opt out
c) Figure out how to opt out.

On the contrary, if only a handful of the many millions of people in ZoomInfo’s system figure this out, ZoomInfo’s business can thrive.

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This is only a problem if enough people:
a) Figure out they are in ZoomInfo’s system
b) Get annoyed and want to opt out
c) Figure out how to opt out.

On the contrary, if only a handful of the many millions of people in ZoomInfo’s system figure this out, ZoomInfo’s business can thrive.

If nobody who gets lung cancer from smoking Marlboro’s figure out who is responsible, Philip Morris’ business can thrive.

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Hi all,

Let me try to answer some of the questions:

  • did they behave responsibly ? Yes absolutely as they removed my profile.
  • am i the right person to make the call ? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
  • were the products needed by my company ? Not at all - these were all low quality products, not the data dog or crowd strike which we already use and didn’t need cold calls to get in

As others have said you can give your email on ZI site and they will verify your profile and let you know if they had one for you. They did.

I understand the company might do super well; and I might change my mind.
But one of my core principles is to invest in company where all parties involved are creating value. Here ZI clearly is, it’s customers might, but I don’t see how this helps the end target person, me.

Shopify or Amazon are excellent examples of the opposite. The company, its product users (small businesses) and the end users are all deriving value from the tool.

For Zoominfo I fail to see the last part. I do want to be obsessed with CAGR but I don’t feel comfortable at this stage encouraging this one.

But again I am no expert :slight_smile:

Hope it helps

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Novice investor here…

After reading through the various discussions in the ZI threads over the last month or so, it seems to me like the biggest challenge the stock has isn’t necessarily the company itself but it may be the perception of this company’s abuse of personal data.

Seems like some people strongly believe that gathering data falls is essentially unethical and / or a nuisance and others seem to have no issue with its practice as they are gathering business data.

I wonder if this may hold the company back in the near term (1-3 years)?

Would love to hear some thoughts on this from some of the more experienced investors here.

Also, seems like its really easy to remove yourself from ZoomInfo. A quick google search led me here.

https://www.zoominfo.com/update/remove.

I do see how Ysdrasill’s experience is a problem for Zoominfo.

Two examples: The simplest is the old white pages in the phone book. You were glad to have your phone number in the book in case someone you wanted to hear from needed to find you. But over time the number of people who you wanted to find you was vastly outnumbered by the number of entities calling you who you did not want to hear from. I was an early adapter to losing my landline and going only with a cell phone. One of the early advantages of that was I got no unsolicited calls. Well, that was a long time ago. Then there came a day when I answered my cell phone (because only those who I wanted to hear from had my number) and I got a call that made me wonder, “how did they get my number?” I NEVER answer my phone now if I don’t recognize the number. And slowly but surely I’m getting more garbage texts too.

#2. Hollywood (Stay with me here). As I understand it from reading the boards here, a highly attractive quality to what Zoominfo is offering is the ability to get past the gatekeepers and go directly to the person who makes the decision. I have worked in (and out) of Hollywood for years and there is no better example of a “gatekeeper” culture. Actors, writers, producers, casting directors… caterers etc. are all trying to get to someone to pitch their value. Everyone is always looking for an in, trying a new gimmick. But the last thing most decision makers want to hear is “I’m an actor” or “I have this script…” or “I hope you’ll come to my show” etc. and the reason for this is because people have had their time wasted so often by people who aren’t good enough or simply not what they’re looking for or are unprofessional or crazy or annoying or dangerous or…

So there are gatekeepers. Gatekeepers are often unfair and arbitrary and develop systems that often do not produce the best results possible. But they’re necessary because if they weren’t there there’d be chaos. Take actors. The number of gatekeepers in the way of a new, unknown actor are ridiculous. So actors are always trying to figure out how to get in front of the right people.

There are always new “Zoominfos” in the world of Hollywood. By that I mean there’s an effort by those on the outside to try and get information that can help them get on the inside. What tends to happen though is some enterprising person breaks in by doing something different. Others hear how they did it and almost overnight everyone is doing that thing. What was original last week is quickly considered trite, then embarrassing, then outright unprofessional.

In the 1990s, before the internet made this kind of information common, there was a prized sheet that would go to casting people and agents. It cost a lot of money and it was definitely not for actors. But it gave all the information of what projects were going to be shooting when and who was casting and what the parts were, etc. If memory serves me, there was a person who worked in a casting office somewhere who was stealing that and selling photo copies to a few loyal customers and then those actors would submit themselves through their bogus agency for parts they thought were appropriate. I think that kind of worked for a time because these original people were qualified actors and submissions to the right people weren’t out of proportion. It still didn’t get them a lot more auditions because again, there’s a gauntlet to go through still, but it was under the radar and occasionally worked out but the person selling that stolen information was himself a gatekeeper of sorts because he was very, very particular about who he sold to and how many people knew because the VALUE he was offering was basically SCARCITY. Once too many people had this information its value was blown.

I use the entertainment industry as an example because I’m familiar with it and it is often so achingly obvious this world of gatekeepers - those on the inside and those on the outside. But I am sure most other businesses have this element in one way or another. The reason there are “gatekeepers” in all of them is because they are necessary.

I think the analogy to Zoominfo is clear. Some posters seem touchy that the inference is Zoominfo is made up of bad people or if you like the company it means you’re a dodgy person. I don’t think that’s the case. I see Ysdrasill’s experience though as a challenge to Zoominfo’s long term value. Yes, there are those sales people with a great product who have done all the research about the company they are pitching to and if they could just get to the right person in that company then everybody’s problems are solved!

But the value of information is its scarcity, otherwise it gets cheap, fast. That golden information those actors were stealing in the 90s is on the internet and easy to find for free and everybody has it so it’s not a competitive advantage. The salesperson who has a great product and knows his audience and has worked hard, etc. is lumped right in with the guy who just calls anywhere anytime because he believes if he can make 100 calls he’ll make 5 sales. Today a person using Zoominfo to get to the “right” person and make his life better is an enterprising go-getter. But will there be a day when using Zoominfo to get to someone be just as desperate / lame / creepy / annoying / exhausting as knocking on someone’s front door at home?

I may be misunderstanding or unaware of all of Zoominfo’s value but I have my concerns that whatever value they are bringing to customers today may soon be information that isn’t very valuable. Today getting the employee flow chart for every company is probably a great lead. The very fact that you are calling this person on their office phone and know what they do and what they are after - today that person does not have his hackles up because if you got through to him then you must be legit. But as Ysdrasill’s post highlights, at some point that guy will have set up some new type of gate keeping system. He recognizes that he may be losing out on that one in a million call that solves his problems but he’s happy to avoid the other million time wasting solicitations.

The most important thing in business is relationships. Do I trust this person? Gatekeeping allows one to feel a certain level of trust without yet knowing the person. Sure, I don’t know this person talking to me but they past through some of the gates so they must be some level of legit. Zoominfo is allowing people to not so much bypass the gatekeepers but it is bestowing upon people the status of someone who has actually gone through the gatekeeping process (“he got to me, he must be legit.”) The more people using ZoomInfo though, the less using ZoomInfo will make you legit.

It’s possible I’m a little off here and this mythical person in the flow chart that a ZoomInfo person is trying to get to is not as popular as I’m imagining. Maybe he won’t be overrun with unwanted solicitations the way Ysdrasill has been.

Whatever the case, the most important thing in business is relationships. Linked-In is clever because it incorporates that. It confers a certain level of legitimacy by showing who a person’s relationships are with. And if we have a shared relationship with someone who is reaching out to us then that helps us build a relationship. I am just thinking out loud but I think if Zoominfo is to grow past this initial phase of “oh my gosh, this is great information!” they may need to play a bigger role in how their information is used or at least - how they make it work for both the solicitor and the solicited.

So maybe all this is saying, I’m curious to learn more about what zoominfo has to offer in the way of helping both sides of a prospective sale gain comfort in developing a relationship. Otherwise I wonder if one day this offering flames out.

Thanks to all who make this board great.
PD

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Ysdrasill - “I don’t see how this helps the end target person, me.”

Zoominfo synthesizes something called intent data. The intent data is based on your digital footprint.

So what is intent data ?
“Intent data shows which leads or accounts are actively conducting research online. When research on a particular topic spikes in activity (is significantly higher than usual), the account is shown to “surge” on those topics. Sales and marketing teams can then prioritize accounts that are surging on relevant topics over equally qualified accounts that don’t show intent. When used correctly, B2B intent data dramatically boosts conversions and sales. “ https://blog.zoominfo.com/how-to-use-intent-data/

How is this relevant to you?
In information systems theory we often talk about costs associated with searching for solutions. For example, time spent researching solutions. Hypothetically, Zoominfo should help you optimize the search costs. But, it only works if the sales and marketing teams use this information responsibly, and not bombard the prospective clients with irrelevant solutions.

  • Leerling
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